It's nearly impossible to explain cyclocross to someone who has never seen it. "You do what with the bike? What if it rains? Do they ever cancel? You race in the SNOW?!" As a 'cross rider, you find yourself at a loss trying to give people a sense of the difficulty, the absurdity, the degree of seriousness participants bring to the sport. In Portland, Oregon, every race is a hipster tractor pull where a thousand people will come out to play in incessant winter rain and mud. On the other side of the country there's Boston, with its manicured courses, expensive coaches and compulsive raceseries points tracking--laughably puritanical but, perhaps, more pure.

Somewhere between these two extremes, somewhere in the middle on the Kinsey scale of love of mud, is the place where 'cross racing is just raw, unadorned beauty. The effort feels like a 40-kilometer time trial in its intensity, like a one-hour criterium in its relentless speed changes and dynamism. Sprint, brake, slide, turn, sprint--as hard as you can, over and over. The demands of technique distract you from some of the physical pain. Sometimes you can forget how badly you're suffering if you have to back off the pedals for a second and try to negotiate an off-camber U-turn, with one foot out of the pedals like you're six years old again and bombing the turn into your driveway on your BMX bike. You pause, take a deep breath, rip your bike like a slot car around a plastic stake marking the edge of the course, and try not to laugh out loud while doing it. Or maybe, just let yourself laugh.

Sometimes, though, 'cross really is just unrelentingly and completely hard. Voluntarily getting out of your car when it's 33 degrees and raining, and you are wearing nothing but a spandex jumpsuit, is sometimes a better story after the fact than it is a worthwhile experience while it's happening. Your car is never far away, you can quit at any time, and still you plod along, shoes full of ice water. Soon you can't feel your hands, which means you can't shift or steer, and you crash in a turn while the rider you were hanging onto like a piece of flotsam in a cold, dead ocean pedals away. You stand yourself up. You clean mud out of your teeth. You know you are done, that you will never do anything this ridiculous again.

Then the race ends. The feeling in your hands comes back, more painful than when they froze initially. Eventually you get home, take a warm shower, begin to put distance between you and the misery. Over the next few days, the memory of the pain fades and you're left with thoughts of how you could have taken a better line through that one turn. How amazing it was to dismount your bike at 20 miles an hour with a punk-rock marching band putting up a wall of sound around you on the other side of the course tape. You thought you were going to die at the time, but now all you can think of is how much fun you had, and how you'd do it again if you could, how you'd do it differently next time. You're left, finally, with the feeling of joy and satisfaction that comes with self-inflicted torment--the essence of endurance sports.

With cyclocross, you get that manic cycle every week if you want. Every Saturday or Sunday--or both--there's another race, with more joy, more pain, more passion, more satisfaction and another opportunity to create an amazing story to tell; a story about something you never want to experience while it's happening, but that leaves you with a feeling you long for once the anguish is passed. That is what cyclocross is all about. It's like real life, but better.